


Well, I Would Have Turned the World To Dream Topping

by handschuhmaus



Series: I Guess It Rhymes With Steve? [2]
Category: Doctor Who (1963), Gravity Falls, Pacific Rim (2013), Phineas and Ferb, Star Wars - All Media Types, Transcendence AU - Fandom
Genre: Breaking the Fourth Wall, Crack, Episode s02e27 The Lizard Whisperer, Gen, I Can't Believe I Wrote This, I'm serious about the crack, It's a Trap!, The Drift (Pacific Rim), a kaiju named..., actually it's her daughter, allusions galore, and Cosinga continues to be a dreadful example of a parent, bringing in the sheaves, but Doof and the kaiju and the future Sith aren't being menacing, but there's plenty of punning yet to be had, some of which originate in now non canon sources, technically Liz Shaw does not appear, terrible Sith puns, the Steve society, the enemy of my enemy is now friendly, the kaiju causes some mayhem, today no one is evil, vague spoiler for Lost In A Good Book, well some of them aren't exactly nice-
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-17
Updated: 2014-10-18
Packaged: 2018-02-21 16:04:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2474156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handschuhmaus/pseuds/handschuhmaus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A juvenile kaiju makes an appearance in the Theed subway. Things get weirder and punnier from there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Well, I Would Have Turned the World To Dream Topping

**Author's Note:**

  * For [saphsaq](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saphsaq/gifts).



> Clearly this revelation drove me mad. Though a tiny bit of the inspiration (the subway part) came from the one I'm dedicating this fic to, despite their being in no way responsible for my fits of crack.
> 
> The title references an aspect of Jasper Fforde's _Lost In A Good Book_
> 
> This is the first time I have written for Pacific Rim and I made some... erroneous presumptions, I'm afraid. But it's a crack fic, so...

_ in the drift - the enemy of my enemy - public art - the apperance of names - aurabesh - tree fruit - friends? - amnesiacs and joke applicants - Frakenstein's monster - the supernatural - in transparent full view - on the street - modes of affection - relative to the distance between them - vegetables - A.W.O.L._

* * *

"I feel slightly drunk," Newt announced dazedly as he sat up from his nap, and spontaneously crossed the room and hugged his lab partner, Dr. Gottlieb. Fortunately he did so gently so as not to jostle Hermann, who was presently more sore than usual anyway.

"Have you injested any intoxicants?" Dr. Gottlieb asked, still wrapped in the biologist's arms. But almost as soon as he asked the question, a strange heady feeling struck him, too, feeling just a little like the drift, and the inquiry seemed moot. Probably, he thought, an odd aftereffect of drifting with a kaiju. Newt, having just woken up, probably wasn't alert enough to think that through. But stray thoughts not his own were popping into his head--questions about some strange subway, it seemed...

* * *

"Well, now we know the Enemy-of-My-Enemy-inator works," Doofenshmirtz announced, though his only audience was his droid, Norm.

"But sir," Norm pointed out, "How do we know it works when we have not witnessed its effects?"

"We were able to shoot it off, weren't we?" the self-proclaimed evil scientist insisted, ignoring the droid's point.

"Now, we just have to wait for Roger's guests to arrive. So we can try it out," Doof announced, rubbing his hands together in what was meant to be a menacing gesture but looked more like his fingers were cold and he was desperate to warm them up. 

"Is your brother really your enemy, sir?" Norm asked stridently. 

In response, the human only commanded rudely, "Shut it, you oversized chatterbox."

* * *

The teenaged (only just, and seven _more_ years to go until he reached Naboo's majority, but the waiting was only made more intolerable by the expectation that he attend public service in the meantime) heir of Naboo's House Palpatine walked crossly down a nearly abandoned street on the outskirts of Theed, shoulders hunched and hands buried in the pockets of the probably unnecessary jacket he was wearing. He was concentrating on his own thoughts, a cross expression on his face, and failing to acknowledge or take any notice whatsoever of the few passersby. Technically, he had not been given leave to be walking around the city, but as with so many of Cosinga's other strict and arbitrary dictates, he had disregarded the rule. 

So buried in his reflections was he, that he barely took notice of a bright bluish-white ray of light beaming down from the skyline, reflecting through a series of narrow mirrors which were ostensibly an artistic installation, and finally being deflected downwards through the stairway straight into the subway station. (where they hit a mirror on a subway car and went off down the tunnel in precisely the right way to hit something which lurked therein). Nor did he take much note of a young dark haired girl in a magenta colored jumper running pellmell for the subway entrance with a camera and a flashlight tucked under her arms. Fortunately they were not destined to collide.

* * *

Underground in the subway station, Isabella Garcia-Shapiro, donning the neck strap of her roving reporter camera and retrieving her journalist notebook from her pocket, turned on her flashlight and prepared to join her friends in exploring the subway tunnels and write about their expedition for the Fireside Girls Gazette. 

Only just visible at the far end of her flashlights beam were the Flynn-Fletcher brothers, Phineas and Ferb, holding their own flashlights and having a quiet discussion that probably involved the presence of a very large vaguely lizard-like creature and the way the subway track had been badly damaged by something emerging from underneath the tunnel--apparently something strong enough to break through duracrete, perhaps the lizard--if Isabella was any good at guessing the feelings of the boys she knew quite well. 

"He's friendly," Phineas, the talkative one (and the one with red hair, and the one Isabella had a crush on), said. "I think we should call him Sheev."

Ferb, who was the very definition of laconic, merely shrugged.

"Why Sheev?" Isabella couldn't help asking. 

"He looks like a Sheev," was Phineas's answer. "Do you want something to eat, boy?"

_How do you know it's not a girl?_ Isabella wondered, but didn't ask. 

"What do giant subway lizards eat?" the red-headed boy inquired.

Ferb remained silent, but quite expressively, and quirked his brow. 

"Oh, right. Mushrooms--do you like mushrooms?" Phineas asked the newly christened Sheev.

* * *

Seeming disoriented, Newt looked around vaguely and asked "Why do you want to know if I like mushrooms? I thought you knew I liked them."

Marshal Herc Hansen, who had entered the lab when the scientists had failed twice to reply to the call of the intercomm, (The matter was quite urgent--the arrival of a scientist who had made a name for herself studying kaiju biochemistry and with whom Newt had been corresponding via email, but not an emergency) was only confused by this. Of course, he was also a little puzzled by the fact that the two scientists were standing very nearly stationary in the middle of the lab and embracing. It was not such a bad thing for Drs. Geisler and Gottlieb to be friends, even friends who were physically affectionate, (Heck, it could have been okay if they were dating, but Hermann was married and Newt claimed to be uninterested) but it was very strange for them to have interrupted their work to do so in the middle of the lab. And to be asking such odd questions. 

"Marshal," Dr. Gottlieb said in a choked voice and shuffled the Newt-Hermann grouping slowly round to the left until he could see Herc over Newt's shoulder. 

"Is something wrong?" the Marshal asked, more for courtesy's sake than because there was any doubt that something was at least slightly amiss.

"We, ah, seem to be in drift with a kaiju. Which is in a strange subway station," Hermann pronounced, shifting his cane.

"With letters we can't read. I don't think the kaiju can either, but then I wouldn't know if it can actually read then-- But they're not Cyrillic or Chinese or Japanese or Greek or Hindi or Arabic or Elvish. I don't even think they're Klingon," Newt rambled. 

Gottlieb suddenly froze and the two men looked straight at each other for a long moment before saying in unison, "It's Aurabesh."

"Aura--? What?" Herc queried, incredulously. It was not particularly welcome news that the two scientists were in drift with a kaiju, though of anyone he trusted them to know it and he didn't think Hermann would be in on such an elaborate prank. But he had no idea what they were referring to now.

"Do you have the Prequel Trilogy?" Newt asked him, sounding somewhat less than sober.

"If you would let go of me," Hermann put in peevishly, "we could google it like sane people."

"Right!" Newt exclaimed and removed his arms from his friend, though he returned his hand to Hermann's arm directly thereafter, if not in a way to impair his movement.

Dr. Gottlieb lowered himself into the computer chair, still with Newt lingering at his shoulder, and began typing.

Shaking his head in some confusion, Herc quietly called Tendo via the intercomm to inform him that something had come up in the K-science lab, since spontaneous drift with a kaiju in a subway somewhere was not a good thing, and to please have Raleigh, or Mako if she was back, escort Dr. Shaw for the time being. 

When he returned to the pair of scientist at the computer, he was mildly dismayed to see a chart of a strange alphabet and the word "Theed" on the screen. "What's Theed?" he asked.

"What indeed," Newt agreed, trying to scroll down and having his hand batted away from the trackpad by Gottlieb.

"It's the capital on Naboo," Hermann put in, a tone of disbelief in his voice that neither of them had thought of it first.

"Naboo?" Herc questioned.

"Silly name, but that's where--well, anyway, that's the planet in _The Phantom Menace_ " Newt explained, rubbing one of the tattoos on his forearm as if it itched. 

"The Phantom--" Marshal Hansen repeated. "You're telling me this has something to do with _Star Wars_?"

* * *

"Where are you going to get enough marshmallows to satisfy _his_ appetite?" Isabella pointed out, and quickly realized that she hadn't said what she meant, "Mushrooms, I mean mushrooms. I mean, they don't exactly grow on trees."

"Some do," Ferb pointed out.

"But not the ones--they're not tree fruit, okay?" she retorted peevishly. "And those kill the trees."

"Hey, enough of that," Phineas said, trying to keep the peace. "Maybe he'd like zucchini. Those get big, don't they?"

"Big enough for Sheev?" Ferb inquired innocently.

"Well, if we thought he'd like them we could try to find some snozzcumbers," Isabella suggested sarcastically. "He's big enough to devour a whole produce department, Phineas. And we don't even know if it's vegetarian."

* * *

"Yeah," Newt answered with complete sincerety, and, his mind running off on a tangent, he jumped on it conversationally. "Let's call her Syne," he remarked out of the blue, pronouncing it like the word "sign".

"Syne?" Herc repeated. This was getting to be an irritating trend. 

Dr. Geisler smiled wide. "After the mother of the Muses. In mythology."

"Are we talking about the kaiju?" the marshall asked puzzledly, but he was ignored. 

"Then it's Syne," Hermann corrected, sounding the E.

"Who says?" Newt responded. 

"It's Mnemosyne. That's how it's pronounced," his colleague argued. 

"Enough," Herc interceded, not prepared to field an argument over the pronounciation of esoteric names. 

But it seemed his intervention was unnecessary, for the next moment, Newt's eyes went wide and he turned urgently to Hansen. "The kids! Are they in danger? Hermann, we've got to--" he explained tersely, and by the marshall's standards insufficiently.

"What kids?" Herc had to inquire.

"Don't you feel it?" Hermann asked Newt fervently, which sounded both singularly unlike something he'd say and yet perfectly in character in terms of tone. "The kaiju _don't_ want to hurt them!" 

"What?! Yes! Why?!" Newt exclaimed in quick sucession.

"I don't know!" the other scientist exclaimed with the same passion, rising from the chair and meeting Newt's eyes with that fervor that seemed to be born of two impassioned scientists in the drift.

Stepping back, Herc sighed and rubbed his head. This matter was giving him a headache and he wasn't sure whether he should be more perturbed about a kaiju in a strange subway system that might have something to do with Star Wars, nor if the spontaneous drift should cause him more concern than it already was and-- His thoughts were interrupted. Raleigh, Mako, and Dr. Jen Shaw walked into the lab, the latter looking immediately concerned at the sight of the two scientists, who had, in the moment that Herc had turned away, embraced again, though not so closely, one of Hermann's arms around Newt's shoulders and the other hand in the air, gesturing, and both of Newt's hands on Hermann's torso, one on his ribs and the other on his back.

"Do you know what's going on?" Raleigh asked him curiously.

* * *

 **Naboo: OWCA Secret Lair**  
"Perry? Perry the Platypus? Agent P?" Major Monogram asked expectantly from the large screen.

"Sir, he hasn't used an entrance yet," Carl pointed out from off screen. 

"I know that, Carl," Monogram responded automatically, even though he actually didn't. 

"Do you, Sir?" the unpaid intern remarked carefully, endeavoring not to suggest that he doubted the major.

"Do I look like Ruggedo the Nome King?" he retorted. 

"I...wouldn't know," Carl said, trying for tactful. The sound of a rolling office chair turning and rolling around on the mat could be heard over the speakers in Perry's lair as the intern came over to the video staging area. "I don't think you look like a gnome, sir," he commented from the corner of the screen. 

"The _Nome_ King," Monogram tried to explain, emphasizing the lack of the silent G. "You know, the amnesiac, forgetting--nevermind," he abandoned his attempt on catching sight of Carl's uncomprehending expression.

"Very well, sir," the intern acknowledged formally and walked back out of the camera's view, muttering under his breath. Francis thought he might have caught words something like "Zagreus sits beneath your bed and eats you when you're sleeping. Zagreus at the end of days, Zagreus come all other ways," but he had no idea what the college student could mean by that.

Monogram hummed a few snatches of "Yellow Brick Road" to pass the time until Agent P made an appearance. 

"He's coming, sir," Carl announced when he had gotten back to his computer. After a moment and the sound of several keystrokes, "And no, sir, you don't look a thing like a Bith."

"A what?" Francis exclaimed, thinking he had said something rude.

"A Bith. Nome, the architect--mysteriously dissappeared some years ago, presumed dead."

"Oh," Monogram responded, unsure what he was supposed to make of this news. 

There was silence in the Headquarters, and thus in the lair (except for the sounds of a precariously balanced box of pencils tipping over and sliding into the box beneath it in the corner) for a moment and then Carl asked "Has Agent P made an appearance yet, sir?"

"No, Carl."

"Sir, we've received an application from a python," the intern informed him. There was the sound of stifled laughter. "He lives on Ten Ebrus Street. He wants to go by Agent V."

"Is that a venomous snake?" Monogram asked in alarm, before he had quite reacted to the rest of the information. "Why V?"

"No, it constricts its prey. Chokes them, sir. But I suppose the policy against predatory animals might apply. And I'm not certain this isn't a joke application," Carl mused. 

Ignoring that, the major shuddered and declared, "A plague be on his house! Carl, vipers give me the willies. Start screening out any applications from dangerous snakes."

Carl could be heard muttering something about a difference between intrinsic and extrinsic danger and how OWCA agents needed to be a certain degree of dangerous to be effective as Perry the Platypus finally entered his secret agent lair. 

"Agent P!" Major Monogram greeted him. "Our surveillance reports that Dr. Doofenshmirtz has built a--what is it, Carl?"

"An Enemy-of-my-Enemy-inator," the intern supplied.

"An Enemy-of-my-enemy-inator," Monogram repeated. "What that could be we don't know. The enemy of his enemy, you, is, well, we don't know that either, actually. It could be a trap. It probably _is_ a trap." Regaining the composure he had momentarily lost, he amended, "Of course, Doof always has a trap. You know that, Agent P, you're one of our best agents. But you had better get out there and figure out what that enemy-my-enemy-- oh, whatever he calls the thing does."

Perry the Platypus saluted and donned his jetpack to depart for Doofenshmirtz's penthouse.

* * *

"Maybe we _should_ go to the grocery store," Isabella suggested irritably, to break the awkward silence. 

"Yeah, we should," Phineas agreed, turning his flashlight on the subway tunnel the way they had come. "We'll be back soon, Sheev. Hey, Ferb, why don't you go by the hardware store and pick up some stuff to put some temporary lights down here so we can see Sheev better?"

They could only dimly see Ferb shrugging and nodding agreement, but then when Phineas's back was turned, Ferb made as if to lurch towards him with a grimace on his face, giving the general impression of Frankenstein's monster. It served to cheer up Isabella, even if Phineas was the one she really liked, and she narrowly avoided giggling and giving away what Ferb was doing. 

Even so, the red-haired brother saw her expression and turned puzzledly around to see what his step-sibling was up to. Fortunately it made him laugh too. "That's great, Ferb. Now we've got to find Sheev something to eat."

* * *

Twenty minutes later, Drs. Gottlieb and Geisler had been settled on the sofa in the lab and provided with glasses of water by Raleigh's fit of thoughtfulness, and Newt had managed to explain the essentials of the situation in short and less than transparent snippets, with some aid from Hermann, to Dr. Shaw, including, most recently, that he was calling the kaiju in the subway, wherever it might be, Syne. Fortunately this did not spark off another argument with Gottlieb about the pronounciation of the name.

"How do you know it's a girl?" Jenny inquired thoughtfully, twisting her finger in her ponytail.

"Well, I don't, and I'm not even entirely sure whether kaiju have two distinct sexes in the human sense, but uh--" Newt flushed, seemingly embarassed.

"She likes feminine names," Hermann provided. "But don't ask how we know that's distinctly her feeling, as contrasted with the hivemind."

It seemed that Dr. Shaw was not familiar with this facet of kaiju psychology, for she pulled a surprised but intrigued face at this statement.

"You could call it Secar," an unfamiliar and very bouncy voice suggested. The occupants of the lab all turned to the door to see that Mako, who often assisted Herc with PR related tasks as an expert on the jaegers, had returned with a young woman who wore an oversized glittery and decidedly unformal sweater and flashed the scientists a peace sign. 

"I'm not sure this is the best time for your interview, Miss Pines," Mako said politely. "A ...matter has come up, and Marshal Hansen is busy." 

"Call me Mabel," the woman suggested, and suddenly, seemingly causelessly, turned to thin air to her left and addressed it, "Hey, I think this is a good idea." Newt and Hermann seemed now to be staring at the patch of air, and indeed, even though Herc would normally have dismissed it as a trick of the light or something wrong with his eyes, he thought he could see the shimmering outline of a top hat floating in midair a few inches above head height. "Sorry," Mabel apologized breezily. "Marshal Hansen, I'm Mabel Pines, expert in the supernatural. I, ah--" she looked at the pair of scientists, who were gesturing and whispering fervently as they stared at the region of the room with the top hat. "Well, I don't even know the full explanation, but my twin brother Dipper got changed into a demon a few years back, and he's not always entirely visible. Alcor!" she hissed, and the figure of a young man fairly like her, dressed in top hat and tails, ...fizzled (there was no other verb) into rather transparent full view. 

"At your service. Or at least hers," he said, a sinister edge to his voice. 

"Anyway," Mabel continued, moving on from the topic of Dipper, "I'd like to discuss the nature of the kaiju with you. Some of us feel there may be something supernatural about them."

"They are from a different universe," Dr. Gottlieb pronounced coolly. 

"Wait, are you Dr. Gottlieb?" she suddenly grew even more excited, ignoring the issue of his comment. "I've heard so much about you--and Dr. Geisler! Man, I've wanted to meet you ever since I heard about the drift with the kaiju! And--Dr. Shaw! Dipper and I and my boyfriend, and even our Grunkle Stan are big fans of your work!"

"Flattered to hear it," Jenny said dryly.

Newt, atypically, had his mind on other matters, specifically the drift, and only belatedly waved at Mabel and said "Hey."

* * *

Nor did the girl's reemergence from the subway system besides another red-headed boy, slightly younger, and a green-haired one who headed off in the opposite direction from the other two, warrent Palpatine's attention.

It was, however, exceedingly difficult seven minutes later not to notice a twelve foot tall lizard like monster which emerged bashfully from the subway stairs, knocking over a bike rack and the attached bikes as it did so. And so he did. 

The kaiju, for that is what it was, (and it was, though only we know this, the one called variously Sheev, Syne/Mnemosyne, and Secar by assorted people) stared at Palpatine.

He stared at it. 

She let out a confused roar, uncertain what the small... human, the word came through the ether beyond the usual kaiju bond--wanted. Or even what he was doing. Her home dimension did not posess streets. Nor, in fact, did it posess subways, but she had been to a cave or two before and it was like those enough that despite the other humans there it had not perturbed her unduely.

Of course, matters were aided by the fact that ever since she had walked into that strange and brittle-hair light (and compounded shortly thereafter by the comfortable meld she had entered with... NewtandDoctorGottlieb they called themselves) upon breaking into the tunnel, the instinct to destroy and wreck distruction that had been bred into her was entirely suppressed to a compartment in the floor of her mind and stomped down quite thoroughly into it, replaced by the feeling that she wanted to ...hug--that was NewtandDoctorGottlieb's notion--the little humans (and maybe nurture them), especially one in a white garment with weird hair. For some reason.

"What are _you_?" he muttered. Large lizard monsters were hardly an everyday occurance in Theed, and even if this one was not particularly hostile, he could already tell it was apt to cause destruction by merely wandering around the city. 

Experimentally the kaiju... Syne, NewtandDoctorGottlieb had named her, batted a limb at the red-headed human.

Palpatine did the obvious if slightly unsual thing and leaped frantically out of the path of the swipe, quite unconsciously lending himself an advantage by aiding his jump with the Force.

They stared at each other again in stalemate, Syne reflecting on the failure of her effort, and Palpatine wondering if it was going to try to ...play, he decided optimistically, with him again, as it was quite likely to do him an injury if it persisted.

* * *

"She doesn't--" Newt began, but faltered, looking puzzled. Oddly enough, when partially in the drift like this, Hermann Gottlieb was the voice of the duo. 

"She's going to hurt him," Dr. Gottlieb pronounced solemly. "Even though she doesn't want to." 

"Him? Him who?" Raleigh asked, not quite certain what they were referring to.

"The human she's facing," Newt supplied, and shot a glum look at Hermann.

"We can't influence her," the physicist sighed. "Not that much."

"Yeah," Newt piped up, with some of his customary enthusiasm, "we might be able to suggest something, but you know, the drift isn't anything like the Imperius Curse."

Mabel grinned at the Harry Potter reference; Dipper floated, pointedly lacking a task; and Mako and Raleigh, the other drift pair, exchanged a skeptical glance at the comparison. Herc was too concerned about the matter, wherever this was taking place (and hopefully it was real, despite the odd Star Wars thing, and not some sort of kaiju training simulation or some such nightmarish thing he would really rather not contemplate the existance of), to be baited into responce, despite being quite familiar with drifting. 

"Is she--is she, you know, influencing _you_?" Mabel inquired.

"Why do you ask that?" Hermann returned.

"We-ell," the young woman began, whipping out a burgundy colored damask pelerine from the knapsack that had been hanging from her left hand and proceeding to don it as she talked, "just call it intuition, I guess. But I think you're acting a bit weirdly."

"Weirdly how? And how would you know how Drs. Geisler and Gottlieb usually act?" Raleigh asked.

"Is--is the hugging new?" Dr. Shaw put in. 

"Yeah," Newt acknowledged, doing, without consciously intending to, a decent impression of being stoned. "I couldn't say why but I just wanted to-- I'm sorry, Hermann. Dr. Gottlieb. I wasn't trying to invade your personal space. I mean--well, I was, but it was because..."

His colleague shrugged. They were still touching: besides sitting very close together, their hands were loosely clasped. "I know, Newt," he said unperturbedly. "There's something influencing the kaiju--Syne, I think, and therefore us."

"Yeah, but that's no excuse," Newt responded. "If it was drugs, or something, it still wouldn't be."

"Well--" Dr. Gottlieb made a half-hearted effort to see who was present in the room. "sometimes, _sometimes_ , it can be... not so bad."

"Is that your way of saying you do not mind it occasionally?" Mako asked in an unyieldingly polite tone, but it was nevertheless clear that she was teasing them lightly.

Hermann dreamily turned a small smile on her. "He's... Newt," he said expansively, as if this explained everything.

"Yes, he is," Raleigh agreed, eyes passing over them before he grinned at his drift partner and stepped over to squeeze her hand. While Mako did not remove her hand from his, she did give him a very small teasing jab in the arm with her elbow, as she smiled a longsuffering smile. His grin only grew broader. And, while it was a distraction from the matter at hand, it did Herc good to see the two of them enjoying each other's company, better because it meant Mako had someone now, after Stacker... But that was hopefully irrelevant. According to what the K-Science department's best (and the only people to drift with a kaiju at all so far) had been saying, this... Syne, wherever the kaiju was, was not intent on distruction as the ones that had come through the breech were. He still couldn't imagine why, though.

* * *

The human and kaiju decided to depart each other's company at roughly the same time, though for different reasons. Palpatine figured it would be best if he were to avoid the potentially dangerous giant lizard and thought there might be the possibility of minimizing his punishment if he could return to where Cosinga had meant him to be before his _father_ finished the morning's business. (But it _would_ run rather long for a morning, and extend two hours into the afternoon.) Syne, kaiju, operating on an entirely different rationale, had spotted a field full of shocks of grain just beyond the city limits (this being one of the rare districts of Theed that bordered on agricultural areas) and found the sight puzzling and intriguing and positively demanding of her interest. 

They hared off along two different sides of a triangle, distance between them steadily increasing as the teen walked rapidly back towards the banking district and Syne set out for the field, dealing less than adeptly with the interposed obstacles as she came to them.

* * *

Only ten minutes thereafter, fairly narrowly avoiding them, Phineas and Isabella returned, carrying half a dozen cartons of mushrooms (which Phineas still thought Sheev would like, for some reason), amounting to one and a half pounds, and an assortment of other vegetables: cabbage, celery, radishes, turnips, radicchio, eggplant, sweet potatoes, bean sprouts--anything they suspected might possibly be tasty for a large presumed vegetarian lizard. They had not tried to get any meat. 

They had to transfer the groceries into an expanding bag with built in collapsable cart that Phineas happened to be carrying in order to have free hands to hold the flashlights required for a venture into the subway system. They quite missed noticing the mess caused by the overturned bike rack. As we already know, Syne, who they were calling Sheev, had already strayed from the subway system, curious about the world, and, truth be told, a little hungry.

"Sheev?" Phineas called to the empty subway tunnel, his voice echoing into the darkness. "Sheev? Where'd you go, buddy? We bought you some mushrooms. And some other vegetables. Sheev! Sheev, where are you?" by the end of this plea, his voice had gone quite forlorn, and his expression grew dejected. 

"Well," Isabella sighed, looking sadly at the dissappointed form of her crush. "Where does a--how tall would you say it was? Ten feet? Twelve feet?--lizard go, on the streets of Theed?" 

"I don't know. But we've got to find him," Phineas said, dragging the cart back towards the subway stairs.


End file.
